


New Words for Old Desires

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Mutual Pining, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Canon Compliant, Pining, Pre-Rogue One, Weird Whills and Force religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 20:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18698410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: Baze’s memory is like a book full of dog eared pages gone soft from him having touched them again and again, every happy moment lingered on when the rest of it has gotten so bad, so hard.





	New Words for Old Desires

I.

Baze’s memory is like a book full of dog eared pages gone soft from him having touched them again and again, every happy moment lingered on when the rest of it has gotten so bad, so hard. Baze Malbus the most devoted Guardian of the Whills has never forgotten anything, but there are things that he chooses not to linger on. That has always been the only way that he can function, the only way he can continue. Otherwise. Otherwise, it would be a tumbling cyclone in the sands to bring him down once and for all, but Baze Malbus has sworn an oath and he will not stumble, he will not fall. Some things are worth standing even when your legs can no longer hold you.

His contrast, his friend, his charge has trouble remembering things. At least the mundane, every day, normal things that happen in the here and now. There are other things that he remembers, other things that he sees with his eyes that should not see anything. He wakes, stirs, in the middle of the night with unknown languages on his tongue, hands in the air, questing for something that neither of them understands, and Baze catches those wrists in his fingers, always surprised by how their hands fit neatly each to each, and speak gently, sing quietly, until the other calms down. Once the curtain parts, once he’s back in the world around them, which is drab and dull and depressing, Chirrut Imwe turns his head towards where Baze is despite those covered, unseeing eyes and looks right into his soul, into it and beyond it so that Baze has to turn his head away for fear of being completely found out, and says, “You saved me.”

It’s one of their many arguments turned jokes. It’s one of the many things they say so that they can refrain from saying anything else, anything that might knock too close on the door of actual things. And Baze sits there, fingers still around Chirrut’s wrists, trying to avoid eyes that can peer right into him despite the fact that they cannot tell him what color his own are, and also not looking at his mouth or the curve of his cheek or the slight beads of sweat on his brow, in his hair. Baze sits and does not skim his thumbs gently across Chirrut’s skin the way he wants to. Baze sits and gathers all the walls back up because his mission is simple: protect the Force conduit that is Chirrut Imwe, preserve the teachings and knowledge of the Whills that exists within Chirrut, and to keep his own self intact since there is nothing in his life that he has forgotten. 

Measured words, agreed upon exchanges are easier when it’s like this, dark and close in the small room they share, which is full of their breath and their scent and their two bedrolls pushed into one. It should grate on his nerves, he thinks, it should make it easier to let this go, the forced intimacy, the lack of space, the way he goes anywhere Chirrut goes, the way they are always together. It should be the antidote to the way his blood churns, the way he wants to place his fingers just there along the curve of Chirrut’s jaw and tilt his head just so and part those lips with his tongue to see if he can feel the twitch and spark of the Force inside of Chirrut’s mouth, if he will flame and sputter up with energy like a broken kyber shard under Baze’s fingers.

All this time should have killed the thing that stalks through his head and his bones and his blood and his heart and screams want. And screams love. It should have killed it, but it has not. Instead, like a carefully cultivated garden, like gently tended yeast rolls, it has grown, it has risen, it has bloomed. One day, he thinks the vines will surely climb out of his mouth, burst through the soles of his feet, the pads of his fingers, skewer him in place, find him out, possess him completely, kill him. Then, he will have failed in his task to protect, to guard.

Baze Malbus, most devoted Guardian of the Whills, who once stood at the temple gates, proud, who once dripped with initiates hung over his arms and along his back and legs, clinging to him as he laughed and showed them that he was the strongest, that the will of the Force was for him to best them, to best anyone, now reduced to this, a man in one small room on the outskirts of NiJedha, wanting to run his thumb slowly across the lower lip of Chirrut Imwe who blinks slow at him. Baze Malbus reduced to a protector for just one man instead of a whole temple. And yet, inside this man, is their whole temple, which is the problem. If Chirrut Imwe were just one man, Baze might let himself try, but he is not. He is every inch of power the Whills managed to keep, he is Force and mantras and prayers and the will, the will of a temple full of people who have always believed.

Because of this, because of all of this, Baze looks away into the darkness inside of their room, trying not to think about the warmth of Chirrut’s skin under his, the way the contact almost burns him because Chirrut’s flesh is unnatural, a side effect of the process undertaken that Baze knows could result in welts and scars if he gripped too long, too tight, or if Chirrut thought it into being. He does not think about what it would be like to be closer, to be more. The chance of that has sailed long ago and will not be coming back any more than the Jedi will be coming back, any more than the Whills will be coming back. 

“You saved me,” Chirrut says again because Baze has gotten quiet, and sometimes Chirrut does not seem to be able to abide his silence.

Baze swallows, and it is just his own saliva in his own throat, there is no reason for any of it to pain him the way that it does, and says, “The Force saved you.” Rote, routine. If Chirrut seems to sigh, disappointedly, at the answer, he tells himself it is only because he does not say it with the gusto the statement deserves. But it is late, and his heart is weary from lying so close, from wanting and never having, and he cannot find the strength to make the words into the light-hearted sounds that Chirrut wants.

“Ah, the Force is it,” Chirrut says, which is a deviation from their carefully scripted plot, and Baze’s fingers fall away from his skin, leaving him feeling chilled despite the fact that it is never cold in their rooms as a result of Chirrut’s very presence.

Chirrut lays back down, which is Baze’s signal to join him; they sleep like this, together, but apart because it is easier, because it saves space in the small room, because it is smarter to conserve heat, because it makes it easier for Baze to calm Chirrut down when the dream visions inevitably eat at him. And. Because. Because Baze wants it and so he would come up with a thousand reasons and a thousand more to never move his bedroll, to never be anywhere but right here even when Chirrut kicks him further into the wall and shoves steadily inch by inch into his space until Baze cannot move at all, even when he wakes with Chirrut’s limbs all over his own, heavier than they should be as a result of dense muscle and denser Force packed into him, and Baze’s fingers will be curled, possessively, over an arm, a leg, a hip, his stomach. They sleep like this, but it is never anything more than this, which is a fact that flares and flames and gutters itself out in the pit of Baze’s stomach because it is so almost. It is so almost but still so far away.

Chirrut lays back down, eyes already closed, breathing quickly evening out to the rise and fall of sleep because he can always do that, he can always immerse himself back as quickly as someone else might slip into water. Baze, however, remains sitting up, looking down at his charge, the way his eyelashes brush his cheeks, and his hair close-cropped because when they let it grow out, the Force fanned through the strands and set them to burning eerily blue, which was too much attention. Baze tried not to show how it distressed him, both the not flames as well as cutting the hair away the next day, forcing his hands not to shake, Chirrut humming Whills songs under his breath while Baze worked. He looks down at him and wonders at the change in routine, brings a hand up, debating brushing fingers over his cheek only to pause, only to stop, only to let them linger in the air while he holds his breath.

If Chirrut opens an eye, if Chirrut senses it, if Chirrut stirs, he will touch him, he will speak, he will ask.

Chirrut, as usual, sleeps on, and Baze lets his hand drop, lets his head hang, lets the tears fall.

It has not always been exactly like this, but it has also never been anything else.

II.

Books from the archive stuffed into his pack, Baze scales the tree in the center of the temple garden and hides himself among the leaves. It is cooler here than in the direct sun and quieter, the sounds of the city and the temple muffled by all the green and held back by the winds that stir his hair. Baze closes his eyes and leans his head back against the bark and thinks that maybe, if he just focuses, he can hear something of the Force, somewhere near him.

Almost as if on command, there is a shout below him, a voice that he knows, a voice that everyone in the temple knows because it never seems to stop. It whoops and hollers and raises itself in song, though it cannot carry a tune. Despite this fact, there is nothing but joy in it, a knowledge, a belief that no amount of studying has yet allowed Baze to reach. Some things, the masters have told him, cannot be taught, must be felt.

Baze has always considered himself lacking in feeling. He does not know whether he can be stirred. He just exists. 

The voice wheels into the air again, louder than any bird, brighter than any flower. “I have found you, Baze Malbus.”

Baze looks through the branches and through the leaves, peers all the way down to the ground to find the hint of a smirk waiting for him on the ground and two brown eyes. “I was reading,” Baze says, “not hiding.” Chirrut Imwe does things that Baze does not understand, like pestering him throughout the day, like seek him out when Baze has sequestered himself alone as though the other has no concept of solitude. 

“The Force is better experienced through the world around us than from books,” Chirrut chides, his voice taking on the tone of the masters but mocking, strange. 

“All the knowledge of our ancestors has been written down and kept so that we may benefit from it,” Baze recites, his own master voice refined, esteemed. In this, they both have teachings to buoy their points. 

“The books will always be here,” Chirrut counters as though that fact will be enough to wrest Baze from his goal.

Baze watches him as he stands under the tree, shifting his weight from foot to foot, pushing his straight, black hair away from his face again and again because Chirrut never seems to have the foresight to pull it back and then it just keeps getting in his eyes. Baze’s own hair is wound up into thick braids and a bun, trapped, contained. “So will the Force,” Baze counters.

Chirrut lifts his arms in a shrug. “The Force is also in others, Baze.” This is usually the end of things, but he lingers there for a moment, hand shielding his eyes from the sun as he looks into the tree at Baze, his hair swaying in the breeze, his smile turning less hopeful with each passing second. 

The Force of others. Baze has heard the teachings, and he thinks that, perhaps, the statement is true. That, perhaps, the Force does linger in others, but he has never found anything to identify that it is inside of him. There seems to be an empty cavern where his Force should be and it echoes hollowly when he prays, offers very little comfort at all. Not like the words he gleans from the books, which fill his mind, one after another, stored in small boxes, and make him think that if he just keeps reading, he will eventually know all the secrets, have found out everything. If he reads enough, then he will be enough.

“You don’t want to come down today?” Chirrut asks after a moment, and this, too, is new.

Baze wants to pull his knees against his chest in a defensive posture, but he also doesn’t want Chirrut to see the motion in case it might give something away. He is quiet. 

“Can I come up?”

Baze stares.

Slowly, hand over hand, Chirrut stretches his shorter limbs, wraps his fingers and his toes into any hold he can find, and ascends. Baze watches. Eventually, Chirrut perches on a branch slightly below his own, his skin sheened slightly in sweat from the exertion, grinning, and holds out a hand. “Well, pass one of them over.”

Baze does, and he spends the rest of their time outside trying not to be distracted by the way Chirrut’s lips move as he reads, by the way his hands constantly flutter, through his hair, over his face, tapping against his leg. And he doesn’t understand why it feels like someone has dropped an ember into him, slowly warming from the inside out where once he had felt empty, cavernous, cold.

III.

Perhaps he could pinpoint the moment when things changed. Perhaps not.

IV.

Their days are spent in strange routines. 

Baze always wakes early, though it is never early enough to beat Chirrut who rises with the sun or the Force or the winds, something. Something ethereal and other that Baze, with his mind full of books and careful words and memories that he can flicker through like pictures on a datapad, cannot sense. He’ll stir to find Chirrut watching not watching him with those eyes that have long ago stopped being unsettling because they are Chirrut even if this Chirrut is not quite the same as the one he knew before, the one who followed him and pestered him, the one who insinuated himself steadily into Baze’s life. 

So Chirrut turns those dimmed, covered eyes to him, those eyes that have the steady blue light of the Force in them, and Baze almost smiles. Almost. “Morning,” he mumbles as he does every time he wakes, even if it is not morning because sometimes, sometimes, they sleep at abnormal hours, sometimes they can both sleep well into the afternoon, especially if Chirrut has had a particularly taxing vision come over him. 

“The marketplace I think today,” Chirrut says.

Baze feels like he is several steps behind in a conversation that is happening between other people, but he just nods and wipes a hand over his face anyway, smoothing out the mess of his beard, checking on the chaos that is his hair, tangled and matted now, none of the fussy, particular braids and buns that he favored in his youth. If he asked, Chirrut would fix it for him. He knows this because that has happened before, but the trouble is Chirrut’s hands through his hair, fingers dug into the strands, easing against his scalp, the way he’ll whisper and sigh and hum, the way his touch makes Baze’s body shudder, the way he wants to turn, twist out of Chirrut’s arms and then back into them, his own hand settled on Chirrut’s jawline. The things he wants are the reasons he does not even take what he is allowed to have.

“Asking for alms again?” Baze asks, and his legs are still pinned down by the weight of Chirrut’s settled over them. It’s fine really. He’s grown used to this.

What he has not grown used to, what he never will be able to, is the way that Chirrut leans in, close, and gathers Baze’s face in his hands, thumbs caressing his cheeks in a way that makes Baze stir in so many places his soul and body feel like they are being pulled apart. His eyes flutter closed for just a second as he sinks into the touch before he opens them before he pays attention, and Chirrut just waits. Baze never knows whether he’s here or struck, somewhere else, somewhere far away, nestled into a bit of the Force or in a chant of the Whills. He is close enough to kiss, but Baze bites his bottom lip, hard, to hold himself back, tries not to pay any attention to the slight tang of blood on the air as his skin gives way. 

“Let me tell your fortune,” Chirrut says as his fingers trace up, skate down, one set questing up Baze’s cheek and into his hair, the others on his neck, curling against it, soft but sparking in a way that Baze thinks about sometimes until it makes him moan. What would it be like, to feel that in other places?

“I have no fortune,” Baze says, trying to be gruff, firm. There is no fortune for the Force depleted, for the cavern made for faith that never filled. He has filled his body with other things, but they are all of the past. Jedha’s past, the Force’s past, the Whills’ past. Baze has no future because he does not allow himself to think there will be time there. He carries everything that was, he records it as he goes, he remembers it, stores it, and he protects Chirrut. The only future he has is whatever future Chirrut manages to make. It is not the best mission, not the best path in life, but it is better than nothing. It is better than standing with a hand against his chest, feeling nothing but the fluttering emptiness.

He is, also, full of something that twists and turns and whines throughout his entire system when he looks at Chirrut, touches him, speaks with him, and that creature, whatever it is, never needs to be unearthed, should stay buried where he can enjoy its twinings but never its ramifications.

Though he keeps giving it chances that will never come. If Chirrut says a particular word one day, he will touch him. If Chirrut turns in his sleep this many times, he will tell him. If Chirrut, then. If Chirrut, then. But Chirrut never does any of those things, and then Baze can breathe normally again. This is the path he is ingrained in, this is the one his feet have eked out in the stone of his life, and it will be fine.

If Chirrut tilts his head and smiles so that Baze can see ten of his bright teeth, he will press kisses to his eyelids tender enough that embodiments of love themselves would weep.

The fingers on his neck curl more, and Baze’s hands are careful, careful folded in his lap to hide the way his interest builds as if Chirrut could look down and find the tenting of the covers. “There is a fortune for everyone, and it flows through the Force like water. Don’t you want me to tell it to you?” Chirrut leans forward, close enough to kiss, close enough to ravage.

Baze shudders. “The only future I have is you.” It is so close to almost being too much.

Chirrut leans back, hands over his face, and it feels like Baze can breathe again, but it also feels like Baze has lost everything. Again. 

V.

The night is calm like the water around them, slightly too cold for this but everything on Jedha is slightly too something. Too cold, too windy, too sandy, too wet, too dry. Too. Too. All of Baze’s life has been spent surrounded with too. Except himself. Where it is suddenly not enough. The dichotomy, he imagines, would get to anyone. 

He sluices a hand through the water, continues to float on his back, looking up at the stars that he can see through the hole that seems to have been punched in the top of the mountain by something bigger than any of them, perhaps by one of the statues now fallen in the desert. Near and yet so far, separated by a span of light glittering on the water, stars and kyber crystals alike reflected in the pool, Chirrut floats with his eyes closed, a smile quirked on his lips, and silent. Surprisingly. 

How many seconds would it take to be by his side? How many more to curl an arm around his waist and hold him close? 

Baze uses a hand to increase the distance between them. 

He thinks he can hear Chirrut’s eyes open in the quiet, thinks he can feel it in the water as he cants his head to the side to watch him. It is dark in the cave, but Baze feels illuminated by the stars, by the kyber, illuminated and vulnerable, floating on his back, naked, everything of him put on display, nothing left to the imagination save the sucking void inside him he fills with all the books in the archive and the strange, warm thing that twists through him whenever he thinks of Chirrut. 

They float, saying nothing, and Baze closes his own eyes, feels how his cheeks warm, now the warmest part of him because the water and the air have cooled the rest. Soon, they will need to go or risk plunging their core temperatures too low. Soon, one of them will have to break the spell, one will speak, one will turn and swim back to shore where Baze’s clothes are neatly folded and Chirrut’s are in an untidy pile. 

Soon.

But for now, Baze keeps his eyes closed, and his limbs spread as though he is one of those starfish they find on the sand of the pools sometimes. He keeps himself on display, and feels the weight of Chirrut’s gaze on him, heavy, almost tactile enough to be a finger edging its way across the scars that dot his body. 

He concentrates on keeping his breathing steady, on not covering the way his thighs and arms and middle are thick, and he makes a list inside his head of conditions that would have to be met.

If Chirrut drifts close enough to touch. If Chirrut hums the festival of the lights song. If Chirrut says his name in a way that makes Baze’s stomach clench. If Chirrut does that thing where Baze can hear him click his teeth and exhale like he is pushing out all the air in his body.

If Chirrut.

Chirrut never does.

VI.

In the shadows of the marketplace, Baze shifts the gun on his back so that he can lean more comfortably against the pillar behind him. Chirrut is right there, in lotus position on the ground, close enough that anyone passing will see him. Some are moved enough by his lopsided grin and veiled eyes that they throw coins into his bowl. Most just hurry by, unsure of where to look, and that bothers Baze even though Chirrut never seems to mind. They don’t live off this money, anyway, it’s not necessary for their own survival. The Whills made sure they had enough to keep themselves alive because they were the only contingency plan. In the whole galaxy, Baze knows, the last living bits of the Temple of the Whills are here, huddled in the shadows of its ruins, begging for money to give to the orphanage that the temple used to keep. 

“I can tell your fortune,” Chirrut says to passersby, his smile so wide and so bright that Baze can almost forget what he is now, sees only that man from his past, the man before the vessel.

Baze sees the fortune telling almost every day, the way that Chirrut will entice someone, usually someone not of Jedha, into sinking down in the sand next to him, holding their hands out so that he can cradle them in his own, his fingers drifting across their palm as though reading the lines there. It’s a good ploy, but Baze knows it’s not the truth. Those lines have nothing to do with anything save the way skin creases over muscle and tendon and bone. Chirrut only reads the Force around them, only dips in that well of might be, could be, never was, always will that surrounds him. Plunges his hand into it and pulls out information in much the same way a lothcat might fish from a stream. 

“Traveler,” Chirrut calls out to no one in particular, to everyone, to anyone who can hear, but Baze knows that each person who passes will think, will feel, that he is calling out to them alone. “Do you know about the Temple of the Whills?”

Baze hisses warnings out between his teeth that Chirrut never heeds.

“I can tell you about the Force of others,” Chirrut continues, voice light, buoyant, carrying up into the air, fanning out across the length of the marketplace in much the same way that the temple bells used to.

If Baze closes his eyes, he can see it all before him again, the long procession of robes, each color indicating another facet of the temple, the smell of incense heavy in the air, the bells, the chanting, the feel of soft paper beneath his fingers as he turns the pages. 

There is a flower scrabbling its way to live through a crack in the paving stones on the road, and he watches as Chirrut’s fingers find it, sees the way it blooms a little more just from his touch alone. The Force.

When they return to their rooms that evening, Chirrut sketches flowers across the wall with the chalk, and Baze feels the thing inside of him lurch forward, upward, keeps his mouth shut tight the rest of the night so that he will not give himself away. Even when Chirrut curls close to him and asks for stories of the temple. Baze just traces letters across Chirrut’s upper arm until he drifts off, lays awake, watching him sleep, the way his eyes dart like startled fish under the thin skin of his eyelids, the way they almost glow with everything captured inside of him.

VII.

Baze watches them pour the Force into Chirrut the way one might fill a glass with water. There are strange lights underneath his skin that make the careful trails of his veins disappear and when it rushes up to Chirrut’s eyes, they film over, blinded.

When Chirrut’s hands clatter through the air looking for a something to hold, Baze reaches out and does not let go no matter how loud the screams become.

VIII.

Chirrut is not the only one plagued by nightmares, uncomfortable dreams that knock on the door of his consciousness, and it is a common thing for Baze to startle awake, dripping with sweat, his hair matted and tangled from tossing and turning, his body tense. He never calls, never cries out. If anything, it feels like all the words have been stolen from him, scraped out of his throat by long, questing fingers and flushed from his mind, from all those endless carefully turned pages that his memory became. He wakes, shaking, feeling the way he used to feel as a young man, empty, not enough, devoid of faith, emotionless and questing.

He wakes and covers his face with his hands and does nothing that might wake his companion still sleeping beside him, arms thrown out across both their bedrolls haphazardly, legs sprawled in such a way that one not used to it might think he was dead, but Baze can see the rise and fall of his chest, can hear the quiet, careful murmurs he makes as he dreams. Baze digs his hands into his hair, pulls hard enough to feel real again, and screams without making any noise. The tears that run hot over his skin are just an aftereffect of everything, and he lets them fall onto their sheets. 

By the time he lowers his hands, there are film covered eyes fixed on him, and that almost makes the weeping start again.

“Let me tell your fortune,” Chirrut says, carefully, quietly, so much softer than normal. “Let me tell your fortune.”

Baze has no future, no purpose other than safeguarding Chirrut and the things in his own memory. One day, the masters said, there will be a need for the Temple of the Whills again. One day, it will be safe for us to rise again. We need, we need, they said. You must, you must, they said. And so they did. He and Chirrut. So they did. Because what else was there for them. What other road was there to take. Chirrut was always going to do it, and Baze could not think of any path he wanted to walk save for the one beside him.

“Let me tell your fortune,” Chirrut says again, and the Force seems low in him now, maybe rocked to sleep, maybe settled just below his skin waiting.

“There is nothing to tell,” Baze says but extends his hand nonetheless. It is not as big as it should be, and it is strangely blank across the palm, a sheen of thick scar tissue from holding onto Chirrut’s until they burned from the inside out.

“My only future is with you,” Chirrut says, echoing some of Baze’s own words back to him, and that is enough to make new tears well.

How he ached to hear words like that before. How he aches to hear them now, to know that they are and are not of Chirrut himself. 

Chirrut holds his hand but does not drag his fingers over the scars on the palm that block any hint of faked destiny. Chirrut holds his hand and slides closer. 

Baze should move away. Baze should stop it. Baze should remind Chirrut that he is the vessel for the temple, for the Force, that he is their last, only hope. Baze should be stern about how he is Chirrut’s guardian and protecting him is his only goal in life, his only meaning. There should not be this thing in his chest warm, growing, expanding, its tendrils drifting up and out and toward. 

He does none of these things, transfixed, wanting. How many years has it been? How many words have lingered on his tongue and then been swallowed back down? How many if Chirrut does this or that has he set up for himself only to see them fail?

When Chirrut reaches his other hand out, when Chirrut comes closer still, when Chirrut’s fingers cradle his cheek like something precious, Baze melts into it. 

Chirrut kisses like a man possessed, which he is, lips smashed right into Baze’s, tongue eager and persistent until Baze opens his mouth, lets him in, moans as the kiss deepens, intensifies. The feel of Chirrut’s tongue inside his mouth is sparks and glitter, makes him think this is what swallowing kyber chunks would be like, ingesting lit coals, but he only moves closer to it, all sense of self-preservation drowned by the rush.

Chirrut is a fire, and Baze is a stack of books with soft, dry pages. 

Their culmination is a blaze.


End file.
